Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/80

 When the Prophet was sixty-eight God sent him a revelation saying that it was through his seed that the world would be redeemed and that all his children would be blessed unto the fifth and sixth generation as the chosen and the true Children of God. It became a great honor for any woman to be chosen as the mother of God's children.

There lived in a house not far from the Temple a young woman of twenty called Eliza Weatherby, the daughter of one of the Prophet's oldest converts. She was a pretty girl, devout and serious, but not without vanity. She sinned by wearing brooches and bright ribbons, and so she attracted many admirers. Her father's house adjoined the building where the produce of New Jerusalem was sold and the mail given out. Through this circumstance she made the acquaintance of a young man, the only unbeliever who was ever allowed within the sacred ground of the colony. He was tall and straight and lean and a Kentuckian. He was a hard rider and employed by the government to bring the mail from Omaha west across the prairies to New Jerusalem. For Miss Eliza Weatherby he conceived a romantic Southern passion which appears to have excited the girl, perhaps because it was so free of all the piety which surrounded the dour courtships of the Faithful. For New Jerusalem was a moral community where there was no dancing or gambling and no drinking of alcohol, and adultery was punished by expulsion from the sect. But the